Amazingly, PopSci has kicked Neil deGrasse off the grass. PopSci normally goes along with "scientific" psychosis, but this was too much for them.
In contrast to previously noted infinitely complex modern genocide, deGrasse's latest idiocy is simple and VERY old. Plato. It's the infinitely stupid dream of "scientists" that all problems can be solved by a one-world government based purely on evidence.
1. Facts are good. Evidence is good. In 'narrow' situations where evidence is available and straightforward, you should use it. For example, the Flint water supply. Evidence about corrosive water is perfectly clear, uncontroversial, and one-sided. The problem has been understood by chemists and by infrastructure engineers for 100 years. Nobody would be harmed by choosing the better water. Lots of people would be harmed by choosing the worse water. The government acted contrary to the evidence and used the worse water, just to save a few dollars.
2. But deGrasse is not talking about 'narrow' situations. The problem with one-world rule can be seen from EVIDENCE. We have 10,000 years of FIRM EVIDENCE that world-encompassing empires are deadly, and smaller governments can be beneficial. The optimum size for a nation is probably something like Uruguay or Belarus. Compact, containing one ethnicity or a group of ethnicities that have mixed well. Anything larger is dangerous.
3. Even in an optimum-size nation, evidence varies with location and class and other characteristics. Any evidence-based policy will favor one group and place, generally the dictator's own group. Think of water rights or eminent domain or outsourcing or immigration where Location 1 gains at the expense of Location 2. If you try to quantify such things using the advice of economists, you'll always favor the tribe that contains economists, because that's the sole purpose of economics. Slaughter the poor, enrich the tribe.
4. And even in the 'narrowest' possible entity, one person in one house, evidence may not give an answer in time to make good policy. Current example in my tiny house: A few days ago I noticed water around the toilet. It looked like the seal was leaking, so I wiped it up, put down a towel, and got ready to call the plumber in the morning. Then in the morning, no more water. After several days with lots of poops and pees, still no more water. Best guess was derived from another odd occurrence. A week earlier I'd noticed a wet length of toilet paper draped over the seat. Ick! How did it get there? Putting those two things together, and adding the fact that the shower drain is very slow, I'm GUESSING that the lo-flo toilet is bouncing back and splashing out once in a while. This hypothesis is NOT based on measured evidence because I haven't seen the splash happen. This is PATTERN RECOGNITION plus a general understanding of how water moves. [I later tested the hypothesis by using Drano. After Drano, no repetition of the splash.]
Good policy is almost always based on PATTERN RECOGNITION plus EMPATHY plus the constraints of price. EMPATHY means getting into the heads of other people or nations or things, and figuring out what they're likely to do in response to your action or inaction. Evidence may sometimes give you a clue or a starting point, but EMPATHY will always work.
Just another little reminder.

The Weather Bureau has FINALLY switched to finer time resolution in their 'observations' page for Spokane. Until now, the timepoints were almost always hourly unless visibility changed. In other words, the page was exclusively serving the needs of aviation. The underlying data was obviously there, but they weren't bothering to publish it.
A few days ago they switched to approximate 10-minute intervals, which makes it much easier to see when the wind is starting to pick up, or when rain is starting to hit. The latter has become more important since Weather.com screwed up their radar. Formerly their radar was a perfect guide to the first and last raindrops; now it doesn't mean very much.
So, in the name of Metrology, Bravo and Thanks!

This sets the all-time permanent unbreakable record for maximum multilevel falsity, turbopsychotic insanity, complexly impossible dyslogic, vicious serial-killing bigotry, unimaginable evil, and infinite negative intelligence, piled in infinite levels. Can't be beaten.
But I'm sure some other murderous hyperbigot will exceed the standard tomorrow or later today. Satan has already blown through all limits of known physics, all limits of limitability, all limits of all.

I don't know if this is just an impression or a fact.... In either case it's good. Several recent local news items show Judge Sypolt cracking down hard on habitual offenders who had been steadily revolving through the doors before.
We have a
SERIOUS
problem with professional criminals here. No need to start identifying these dudes with 100 separate felony convictions. The cops know them well. We just need to keep them in jail.
Should be simple, but until now the cops, under the thumb of Copkiller Straub, were ever so gently advising the habituals that crime may be a slightly less than optimal way to live, and the judges were doing the same. Spinning the door. Arrested, charged, freed. Next day, arrested, charged, freed. Next day, arrested, charged, freed. Next day, arrested.....
I hadn't heard of Sypolt before, either in the news or in my jury duties. Is he new? Looking up ... No, he's been here for 20 years.
I don't know what finally motivated him to break ranks with the door-spinners, but I'm GLAD he did.

Despite my snotty parody, occasionally actual news sources actually write actual news, information you didn't know before and information you can use. Even better, the actual news sources write the information in a style that adds value and makes it memorable. Real journalism!
This Daily Mail article on Juncker fills the bill. Explains in lively language why Juncker acts like a Mafia don. Why? Because he is. Luxembourg is a criminal syndicate serving all the biggest and best criminals, like Amazon, Apple, IKEA, Disney, AIG, Dyson, Microsoft and PepsiCo.
The detailed history (told here) is even more interesting. Luxembourg had been a steel-maker. When EU free trade and EU Gaian genocide killed steel in the '80s, the country found its new role as a tax criminal, and Juncker ran the racket. During his 18 years in charge, he used blackmail and bribery to halt all efforts to investigate his crimes.
The Daily Mail mentions Juncker's Grand Monument To Himself, a new city called Belval, always under construction but never used. Googlestreet doesn't disappoint:
North Korea, anyone?
This appears to be the Grand Entrance to the Grand Monument. Googlestreet won't go there. It slides past when you try to click forward.
Yes indeed. This drunk brutal mafia gangster is the Revered Leader of the Enlightened Ones, the Lord and Prophet of the Brights. 'Twas always thus.

A sadist in the Everett area is leaving tennis ball bombs scattered around, apparently hoping to explode a dog. Police are warning people with the usual clumsy cop-talk phrasing:
If you think you have come across such a device, proceed with caution and contact your local authorities immediately.
Proceed with caution? Contact local authorities?
Those are like shelter in place meaning STAY INSIDE.
I tried to rewrite it mentally, then realized my rewriting contains a warning that ISN'T NEEDED now, a warning that shows my Unperson-ness.
My more direct version would have been:
Don't touch it. Remember or mark the location, then go and call the police.
Now the part about Marking is unnecessary because everybody has their phone in hand all the time.
I'm not everybody. I'm nobody. I've never owned or handled a Portable Cellular Telephonic Device. So I assumed the old way of using phones. Unperson. Negative Externality. Marked for extermination.

Wouldn't it be nice, and EFFICIENT, to have a news aggregator that let you hear ONLY actual information by the Shannon definition? It would filter out all the default stuff, the automatic stuff, even if the default stuff is falsely portrayed by other media as SHOCKING.
Supreme Demons order millions more babies killed? Sure as sunrise. Filter it out.
Supreme Demons allow a state to make its own laws for a few milliseconds? Wildly grotesquely unexpected. Send it through.
Republican politician charged for "ethics"? Sunrise. Skip.
Democrat policitian charged for "ethics"? Real information. Send it through.
Tribe member charged with anything at all? EXTREME news, but physically impossible, so it's a null point.
Hollywood creature "comes out"? More certain than sunrise. On the level of "existence exists".
Hollywood creature is found to be heterosexual? Beyond impossible. Hypernull point.
Referendum canceled by a court? Sunrise. Skip.
Referendum allowed to take force? Let's hear it!
Brexit fails? Normal. Default. Skip.
Brexit succeeds? GENUINELY astonishing. All the indications, not just the media shit but the valid paranoid indications, pointed to Remain.
Brexit is allowed to take force? Physically impossible. Null point.
= = = = =
Overall, then, any news that would count as actual information is impossible, so the Voice of Shannon would be silent.

Thinking back to the '70s when I was working and traveling a lot, always on a low budget.... There were several times when my old car or company truck failed, and I had to call relatives or friends or boss to come and get me. Those events were uncomfortable, especially the ones involving company truck and boss.
The discomfort could have been avoided if I had carried a FOLDABLE BIKE in the car or truck. I was always a good biker, and could have made it to work or home or gas station or motel without troubling other humans.
Why didn't I think of this in 1970? Waaaaay too late now.

Conventional USA wisdom says that Russians are easily regimented and naturally prefer a Strongman like Stalin.
I blindly accepted this wisdom until RIGHT NOW when I finally stopped to think about it.
Obvious caveat: PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT, and any nation-sized sample will contain a huge range of personalities.
Based on three data points, I have to conclude that the typical or median Russian is far less regimented, much harder to control, harder to deceive, than the typical American. The correlation may have been different before 1900, but these data points cover a considerable range of time.
1. Ford's attempt to set up a Russian factory in 1920. Ford production methods required strict organization and regimentation. Americans adapted easily. Russians didn't. Ford found it was simply impossible to pull Russians into tight synchrony and finally gave up.
2. Soviet math and science education starting in the '50s. While America responded to Sputnik by strict rigid implementation of an insane brain-destroying dystheory, Russian students were doing hands-on experiments and discussing the results. American teachers occasionally try the experimental method but soon fall back into line because the students can't deal with anything beyond memorization. (I know this from direct experience!)
3. The ex-Soviet immigrants who moved to Spokane in the 1990s are tremendously entrepreneurial. Many of them run their own businesses. This didn't take any training or adaptation; they just started and succeeded. Caveat: Migrants tend to be the looser or wilder types within a national personality range. BUT these folks were not escaping the Soviet system; they were escaping the immediate post-Soviet mess engineered by Soros to enrich Soros. Thus they are more likely to be at the orderly end of the behavior range.
Three different observations in different areas of life over 80 years. In each case Russians found it easier to act individually, and harder to take regimentation, than Americans.
= = = = =
Half-baked genetic guess: Before 1900 Americans were more English than anything else, by genes and culture. We were stubborn and rebellious. Our self-myth retained this image after it disappeared from reality. After 1900 we're more German than anything else, by genes and culture. We follow Kraut models in everything. Stalin felt the need to keep America weak because he understood this. He knew that we would realign with Germany after WW2, so he tried to keep Germany divided and keep us conflicted.

I'm slowly and reluctantly sliding away from the old way of paying bills. A couple months ago I switched CenturyLink from mail to online payment. Their system messed up and submitted both types of bill for the previous month, so I paid both ways. Better to get ahead than behind.
But their system continues to mess up. Their programmers don't know how to handle 'ahead'. When the current bill has already been paid by previous overpays, the normal procedure would be to send a bill that indicates clearly "No need to pay this month" or some such phrasing.
The new online bill, after getting through the security questions:
Well then, which amount should I pay? $Temporarily.Unavailable or $0.00? In either case there will be a $3.50 fee for using a credit card. It's ALMOST enough to make me switch back to paper. The only holdback is that their system will inevitably screw up even worse on the transition.
Systems should be able to handle common situations. Prepaying is not a wild outlier like paying in barleycorns or Klingon Darsek.

Following on this sequence...
When leaders are PERFECTLY isolated and disconnected from normal humanity, they constantly prove what normal humans suspect.
The people who are being disemployed and raped by Migrant Dreamers in Europe and USA understand ACCURATELY that the invasion is perfectly intentional, perfectly genocidal.
A sane bureaucrat would realize that the people know what's going on, and would either stop committing genocide or at least try to cover his bloody tracks.
Not Juncker.

Jean-Claude Juncker has given members of the European Commission strict instructions — he called it an “edict from the Mufti” when speaking to MEPs — not to hold any talks with Britain or visit the country until the U.K. government launches formal proceedings to leave the EU.

You suspect that I'm colluding with ISIS to send terrorists into your midst? Well, by god, I'll show you who's ISIS! I'm the Mufti!
= = = = =
HOWEVER: Some refreshing exceptions to the rule are starting to appear, in small countries where the leaders are physically closer to reality. The prime ministers of Holland, Lithuania and even BELGIUM seem to understand the problem, at least verbally. Belgium's PM says: "We have to show that Europe brings a real added value that can be felt by our fellow citizens."

Normally Satan uses statistics to create tyranny.
But when stats might make a TROLL TRUMP FARAGE KKK HITLER point, Satan knows how to avoid stats.
BBCsatan wanted to answer Farage's claim that most MEP's have spent their life in politics. The way he phrased it was better than the usual US Repooflican line about 'making a payroll'. He said "I know that virtually none of you have ever done a proper job in your lives or worked in business or worked in trade or ever created a job."
Working in a real business is the point, not just being a boss. Lower-level employment is more meaningful when we're trying to judge a politician's grasp of reality as lived by ordinary people. Even more important, I think, is working with your hands. If you have done a job that requires using your hands and eyes and nose and ears together, you have a REAL AND LITERAL grasp of reality. Surgeon, barber, masseur, car repair, cook. Anything that develops a judgmental connection between your senses and your hands.
BBCsatan has lots of researchers. With a proper database, which I'm sure thay can afford to access, it should be possible to make a snap judgment on all 750 MEPs in an hour.
Instead, BBCsatan avoided numbers entirely and reverted to pre-math thinking:

There are 751 MEPs in the European Parliament - too many to look at it in one article - so we've looked into the previous careers of the 14 who spoke at the session today.
Let's start with Marine Le Pen. She began her political career in 1998 as a regional councillor, but before that she practised as a lawyer for six years. She is trained in criminal law and also worked as the director of the Front National's legal service from 1998 to 2004. ... etc

Individual listings for the 14 who were 'on deck' when Farage was speaking.
Pretty neat trick.

Every month or so I check the available projects in DonorsChoose.org. Seems like the originality is fading lately. Nearly all the "needs" are iPads, "wiggle seats" or rugs. "Wiggle seats" are clearly a fad, or a way to substitute for proper recess.
One teacher just wanted a clean rug. Doesn't your school have a janitor? If not, buy a Dirt Devil and organize the kids to use it. Turn it into a regular housework lesson.
Found exactly one project involving hands-on learning, and supported it. Slim pickings.

This.
30-year-old runs wild in a cathedral, grabs a long crozier thing, spins it around in a Ninja routine, breaks off parts of the figures in a Last Supper sculpture, rearranges the furniture, lights all the candles.
In the brief security video he seems to be thinking "Hmph. I thought this was going to be fun. It isn't."
What did he expect? I'm pretty sure Candle-Lighting Jesus-finger-busting Crozier Ninja isn't a recent movie that would inspire emulation.
= = = = =
Later: I didn't intend this parallel but it works. Repooflicans have spent ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR FOUR YEARS chanting BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI
and now they finally get the orgasm:
House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton
Well. Was that as much fun as you thought? Apparently it was, which means that Repooflicans are vastly less perceptive than a meth-soaked gamer.
The worst part: Because the Repoofs were fully and totally engaged in chanting the magic word, they were paying exactly zero attention to AMERICAN VOTERS. American voters don't know and don't care what a BENGHAZI is. We only want to STOP MAKING AGGRESSIVE POINTLESS WARS IN PLACES THAT DON'T MATTER ONE FUCKING BIT.
Trump was paying attention to American voters. He grabbed onto our REAL emotion and rode it to the Repoof nomination. We still don't know if he will follow through, but AT FUCKING LEAST he was PAYING ATTENTION.

For a couple of years Erdogan was acting confused, perhaps under the pressure of Syrian migrants. He abandoned his previous Zero Problems policy. Now he seems to have recovered. Productive negotiations with both Israel and Russia.
The latter is especially important. Europe is failing, and Europe has never been Turkey's friend. Russia is on the upswing, and Russia can be Turkey's friend. I don't know why Erdogan went off his path, but it's GOOD that he's back.
7/15 update: Well, we have a partial explanation now. He abandoned Zero Problems to keep the military happy. When he returned to Zero, the military got REAL MAD. Armies need problems to justify their budgets. This still doesn't explain WHY Erdogan decided to switch back.

Convective thought....
I've been placing Brexit alongside other empire-breaking moments like Sarajevo 1914 or Gandhi 1948 or Hungary's border opening in 1990.
No, it's not the same. Those empires had grown, matured, spoiled, run their course. They were full of rot and bark beetles, ripe for toppling, and it didn't take much of a wind to crash them.
EU is an empire of similar size and power but it's a NEW empire. EU was SOLELY a trade zone until 1992. At that point the imperial trappings started to grow, but it's only in the last ten years that EU has been BEHAVING like an empire.
Measuring indirectly, Brexit must be a stronger wind than the abovementioned breakers. It toppled a fresh active growing empire.

Polistra likes to collect linguistic shibboleths.
RULE: Any time you see a headline or title in the form There is no X or X is a myth you can be 100% certain that the author belongs to X or is contained in X.
There is no Republican Establishment = I am part of the Republican Establishment
There is no Wall Street Elite = I am part of the Wall Street Elite
Tribal control of the media is a myth = I am part of the tribe that controls the media
Housing bubbles do not exist in Canada = I am head of Mortgage Professionals Canada.Scientific consensus is a myth = I am a market-maker for the scientific consensus
A new one today.
The myth of the catty woman by Sheryl Sandberg
7/26: a new variant. I condemn X = I am X.
I Condemn All Threats to Turkey’s Democracy by Fethulla Gulen.

I will repeat what I said on my first trip. I repeat what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: that they must not be discriminated against, that they must be respected and accompanied pastorally. One can condemn, but not for theological reasons, but for reasons of political behavior...Certain manifestations are a bit too offensive for others, no? ... But these are things that have nothing to do with the problem. The problem is a person that has a condition, that has good will and who seeks God, who are we to judge? And we must accompany them well...this is what the catechism says, a clear catechism. Then there are traditions in some countries, in some cultures that have a different mentality on this problem. I think that the Church must not only ask forgiveness – like that “Marxist Cardinal” said (laughs) – must not only ask forgiveness to the gay person who is offended. But she must ask forgiveness to the poor too, to women who are exploited, to children who are exploited for labor. She must ask forgiveness for having blessed so many weapons. The Church must ask forgiveness for not behaving many times – when I say the Church, I mean Christians! The Church is holy, we are sinners! – Christians must ask forgiveness for having not accompanied so many choices, so many families...I remember from my childhood the culture in Buenos Aires, the closed Catholic culture. I go over there, eh! A divorced family couldn’t enter the house, and I’m speaking of 80 years ago. The culture has changed, thanks be to God. Christians must ask forgiveness for many things, not just these. Forgiveness, not just apologies. Forgive, Lord. It’s a word that many times we forget. Now I’m a pastor and I’m giving a sermon. No, this is true, many times. Many times … but the priest who is a master and not a father, the priest who beats and not the priest who embraces, forgives and consoles. But there are many. There are many hospital chaplains, prison chaplains, many saints. But these ones aren’t seen. Because holiness is modest, it’s hidden. Instead it’s a little bit of blatant shamelessness, it’s blatant and you see so many organizations of good people and people who aren’t as good and people who … because you give a purse that’s a little big and look at you from the other side like the international powers with three genocides. We Christians – priests, bishops – we have done this. But also we Christians have Teresa of Calcutta and many Teresa of Calcuttas. We have many servants in Africa, many laity, many holy marriages. The wheat and the weeds. And so Jesus says that the Kingdom … we must not be scandalized for being like this. We must pray so that the Lord makes these weeds end and there is more grain. But this is the life of the Church. We can’t put limits. All of us are saints, because all of us have the Holy Spirit. But we are all sinners, me first of all! Alright. I don’t know if I have replied.

I'm not going to grab the obvious bait. Nothing new to say there. We already know what this monster is. Instead, I'll take him at his word that he's just being a pastor. He talks about prisoners, so let's focus there.
Do prisoners need or want a pastor who doesn't judge, a pastor who CAN'T PUT LIMITS, a pastor who takes all sides of an issue at once? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Professional criminals can't stand wiffling and waffling. They respect a man who holds his GROUND, who provides a fixed REFERENCE POINT. Criminals have an extremely strict moral code, which agrees with the Old Testament moral code in most ways. The only real disagreement is on Thou Shalt Not Steal. Everything else is Natural Law, even unto A CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of Thou Shalt Not Murder. A robber doesn't kill randomly; he kills in self-defense to halt people who interfere with his Stealing.
If you can get a pro criminal to reverse the polarity of his Stealing battery, the rest will fall into place. But his system cannot allow an open-ckt input for random noise, which is exactly what Francine is trying to provide. All wires must connect logically and firmly, and all neutrals must be spiked to the earth of Natural Law with #00 copper rods.
This is why Islam is spreading in prison, why Islam does a better job of reforming than Christianity. Islam is a tight coherent structure, solidly grounded.
= = = = =
Graphic sidenote 1: At first I had a dummy ckt in the picture, then decided to make it functional. This little JFET ckt sort of models the notion of a two-way morality detector.
Graphic sidenote 2: What's that tool in Antichrist's hand? Can't quite remember what it's called....
Graphic sidenote 3: I really enjoy the idea of soldering iron as symbol of reconnection. It works for me.

Anti-Nature has a few vignettes showing how "British" "scientists" react to Brexit. Drably predictable. "Scientists" love tyranny and corruption and rigid orthodoxy and falsehood, which means they love EU.
Listing the reactions:
Terrifying, depressing, grieving, devastating, heartbroken, disappointing, concerned, catastrophe, shocked, disappointed, harsh, unworkable.
Or in more direct terms,
I LOVE MONEY. I HATE FACTS. GIMME TRILLIONS SO I CAN OBLITERATE THE UNIVERSE! I DESERVE TRILLIONS. I AM GREEDY. YOU TAKE MONEY AWAY. WAAAAAAH! MINE! MINE! MINE! ALL MINE! GIVE BACK MONEY! MINE! ME! ME! ME! MEEEEEEEEE!
One of the commenters breaks out of the tantrum and says something a bit more rational but flat wrong:
I am also concerned about the impact on the free movement of labour and the restriction on the skills base if the UK turns inwards.
Got it backwards, fuckhead. When labor moves freely, skills atrophy. Each country specializes and loses most of its skills. Graybill, asshole.

Article in MIT Tech Review starts to make a good point but misses it by a thousand miles.
Talking about the Facebook selection bias, the author says that some kinds of bias are unavoidably baked into the code, so it doesn't matter how you use it. True of some types of bias (eg misuse of stats), but none of her examples fit the point.
First she claims...
One area of potential bias comes from the fact that so many of the programmers creating these programs, especially machine-learning experts, are male.
Machine-learning types are Nietzscheans who see themselves as GOD, fully authorized to exterminate all Negative Externalities (IQ<200). This bias shows up in the code of autonomous vehicles, which are specifically designed to exterminate the slow and poor and old. But this is not male vs female, this is psychotic vs normal. The author doesn't give any examples of male vs female, so we have to conclude that the author is an anti-male bigot.
Then...
Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney looked at the Google AdSense ads that came up during searches of names associated with white babies (Geoffrey, Jill, Emma) and names associated with black babies (DeShawn, Darnell, Jermaine). She found that ads containing the word “arrest” were shown next to more than 80 percent of “black” name searches but fewer than 30 percent of “white” name searches.
Sounds about right. If black parents would stop giving their kids black names, the problem would disappear. When you identify yourself right up front and publicly by race, advertisers will naturally hit you with ads that are likely to fit your needs.
Rehashing a point I've already beaten to death: Before 1968 black people didn't have black names. Here's the first few columns of two pages from the 1940 Enid census again. Each page is entirely one race. See if you can tell which is which before you right-click the names of the JPG files. I've copied out the names into text to make the task even easier. (Skipped a couple names that I couldn't decipher.)
Florence, Cache, Eugene, Charles, Bertha, Opal, Robert, Shelley, Pearlie, Carrie, Amy, John, Ida, John, Lillie, Edith, William, Lawrence, Clarence, Johnnie, Teddie, Lorenzo, Annie, Geneva, Jay, Florence, Mariah, Lona, Alonzo, Clarence, Inez, Webster, Laura, Reginald, W.B.
John, Berniece, Roy, Mary, Bobby, Freida, Patricia, Elmer, Ida, Cloyd, Geneva, Billy, Lon, Susie, Billy, Edith, James, Madge, Joe Ann, Jerry, LeRoy, William, Etta, Ina, George, Mary, Henry, George, Lillian, Willie, Charles, Orville, Ernest, Emma, Delores, Ramona, Ernest Jr, William.
There's no way an algorithm could sort those names AS names. If the algorithm also knew the Zip code, it might be able to make a better guess; but even in mostly segregated 1940 you'd really need LOCAL knowledge of which blocks were black.
In other words, the example given by the author is NOT discrimination by algorithm. It is simply an accurate use of FACTS. It is SCIENCE.

Excellent NYTimes headline:
European Leaders Tell a Dazed Britain to Get Going on ‘Brexit’
Dazed. Perfect word.
Meta: The FACT that the British elite were dazed, stunned, gobsmacked, sucker-punched by the result is the COMPLETE AND DEFINITIVE EXPLANATION of the result itself.
The elite and media had lost all contact with the nation they misruled. They were governing an imaginary nation that existed only in their alien heads. Cameron knew that he was safe in calling a referendum because the voices in his head were purely pro-EU. He never heard the voices of any actual British people.
The referendum came out Leave because the people were TERMINALLY TIRED of watching the ACTUAL nation turn to shit while the IMAGINARY nation got richer and richer and richer.
Same in US and most of EU, except that US won't get a referendum. We get a fake "election" which will be Rectified by the Electoral College or the Supreme Demons if it comes out wrong.

I worked for the Bridge-Throwing Agency. Our mission was to find heretics and throw them off the bridge into the river. This wasn't easy because, like any good agency, we had to Comply with all sorts of Regulations about Bridge Safety and Humane Treatment and Email Preservation and especially Environmental Protection of the rivers where we threw the heretics. Despite all these tiresome Obstacles we were Passionate Around Our Mission.
= = = = =
As usual I'm impressed by the cleverness of my dream-scripter. As usual I wish to hell it would work in waketime when I need a little cleverness. But where did this come from?
Best guess: I had been thinking (pointlessly) about my past jobs... Was there a way I could have stayed in one job for 50 years? After paging through the actual jobs, the answer is No, because none of those employers lasted. Some went out of business, some were LBO'd. In more recent years the research contracts I worked on were limited in length. Even if I had been more steady, the jobs themselves wouldn't have held up.
Among relatives and friends, a few managed to hold one job for a lifetime. Those jobs were government jobs or Bell Tel jobs. Nothing else. Among all businesses, only Bell was loyal to its loyal employees.
The dream-scripter might have started with that realization, might have been trying to illustrate the problems with a gummint job. Maybe.

Was rereading a book on Soviet autos, which includes a chapter on Chinese autos following Soviet designs, which were following American designs. The author is an expert on cars but not so strong on language-related shit. He simply follows his sources on transliteration. The names of cars (Hong Qi) are modern, and Beijing is modern, but for some reason Shang-Hai is not modern.
The contrast made me think... we've skipped the hyphens in Chinese place names for a long time. We were writing both Peiping and Shanghai consistently in the 1930s. Google's ngram thing shows that Shang-Hai disappeared suddenly in WW1, which is rather strange. Did we consider China to be German? Checking... No. China wasn't really involved, but it was nominally on our side, along with Japan.
BUT: We continued using hyphens in personal names much longer. Even now, in the modern Pinyin transliteration, we often write Mao Ze-dong.
None of those hyphens make any sense. The hyphens aren't there in Chinese, and the names aren't considered to be compounds. The only difference is that China doesn't borrow foreign names, so the meaning of each syllable is always present in the background. English happily borrows foreign words, so most of our names aren't separable.... but we also use compounds with retained meanings, and separate words. Running along US24 east of Manhattan (borrowed Injun), we find St George (separate), Wamego (borrowed Injun), Belvue (compound with retained meaning), St Marys (separate), and Rossville (compound with retained meaning). We don't put hyphens in any of them.
Were we using hyphens for Chinese to indicate that each ideogram represented one syllable? Maybe, but we also used hyphens to separate the syllables of Injun names that had never been written in any form, as in this passage from an Osage story:

"Place this earth on your foreheads when you offer up your prayers and you will excite the compassion of Wah-Kon-Dah, the Great Spirit’, the crawfish told them. From this time on, the Little Ones rubbed this earth on their foreheads when they prayed to Wah-Kon-Dah at dawn, and in their ceremonies and vision quests; it was symbolic of their humility.

If we write Wah-Kon-Dah, we might as well write Fore-Head and Craw-Fish and Sym-Bol-Ic. In both languages Syll-Ah-Bulls are syllables.
Only possible conclusion: The hyphen thing was our way of indicating "This is a primitive language. These people can't master multisyllabic words."
= = = = =
Sidenote on the ngram: The word frequency of Shanghai moved up and down in the 30s and 40s then held steady from 1945 to the present. In reality: from 1930 to 1980, China was basically meaningless to Americans. It was a strategic tool for diplomats and generals but normal Americans had no reason to think or talk about it. After 1980, China became our factory. It's a tool for traitorous corporations to steal American jobs. We talk about it all the time. The ngram seems backwards.

Following on previous item about Brexit showing the superiority of Parliament. The British system also works to reject poor leaders on the opposition side.
Corbyn is also running into trouble for failing to win his side ... which was the SAME as Cameron's side ... Shouldn't that immediately tell you what's wrong?

The Labour leader is facing a no confidence vote over his "lacklustre" campaign for a remain vote. He vowed to fight off any leadership challenges, and told one activist who heckled him as he attended a Pride march in London: "I did all I could."

Attended a homosexual march. Self-explanatory sentence if you know the obvious facts.
Obvious facts: Brexit succeeded BECAUSE Labour voters got out and voted. Labour voters made the difference. REAL Labour voters. Union men. Working men. Former coal miners. Former steel workers. Men who had good jobs before globalization. And in Britain, globalization mainly means EU.
Corbyn has NOTHING to do with those union men. He has EVERYTHING to do with Globalism and Gaia and Die-Versity and Trans Things and Homosexual Pride. His utterances on economics are jumbled and confused. Conservatives accuse him of being Marxist, but he's got Marx all wrong, just as Bernie does.
Here's a couple paragraphs from the 1977 SOVIET Constitution.

The state exercises control over the measure of labour and of consumption in accordance with the principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work". It fixes the rate of taxation on taxable income.
Socially useful work and its results determine a person's status in society. By combining material and moral incentives and encouraging innovation and a creative attitude to work, the state helps transform labour into the prime vital need of every Soviet citizen.

To each according to his WORK, not his NEEDS or ves GENDER FLUID.
Doesn't sound like Freestuff. Doesn't sound like Homosexual Pride or Die-Versity. Sounds just like Graybill. Sounds like the proper and correct CIVILIZED damping of natural inequality. Status in society is determined by the results of your work, not by your attractiveness or the precious metals in your name.
Labour voters in England and Populist voters elsewhere remember a time when our system approached that ideal without having it in the Constitution. We know it's possible because it HAPPENED. Things that HAPPEN are possible by definition.
= = = = =
Sidenote: It's fun to watch the Express changing its headline and picture as more and more Labor MPs pull out of Corbyn's shadow cabinet. Since he doesn't have the sense to resign, the party is seceding from him. Especially wonderful since the mutiny is a contest to see who can be most ANTI-LABOUR. Corbyn wasn't ANTI-LABOUR enough for his assistants, so they're trying to kick him out and find an even more ANTI-LABOUR leader for Labour.

A meta-thought.
The Brexit process, ALL OF IT, shows why Britain's parliamentary system works VASTLY better than the US mess, and shows yet again why 1776 was a giant mistake.
This would still be true if the referendum had favored Remain. I'm talking SYSTEM, not results.
NONE OF IT could happen here. Our dysgovernment would never agree to a national referendum on anything. We've never had a national referendum, and our Presidential "elections" are systematically corrupt. The Electoral College has no purpose but corruption.
The aftermath of Brexit continues to show Parliament's superiority. Prime Ministers are temporary outgrowths of Parliament. When a PM fucks up, his own party will usually fire him and bring up the next man in line, WITHOUT HAVING TO WAIT EIGHT YEARS until the next fake "election". If his own party is slow in firing him, the opposition will call a vote of No Confidence which requires a new election, and a change of national direction, SOON. The mechanism steers out of a skid.
In this case Cameron understood that his reputation was on the line, and when the people voted against his intentions on Brexit, he immediately offered his resignation with proper transition time. If he had tried to stay, his party or the opposition would have fired him. Because he knows the consequences, he picked the cleanest way of quitting. He won't be PM again, but he still has a good future in politics. Leaders are rewarded for doing the right thing.
Parliament is an old and NATURAL system, developed through centuries of ADAPTATION. Therefore it's still the most ADAPTABLE of all systems, the most responsive to negative feedback.
Our system was based on a wildly insane set of false theories about "equality", and stopped adapting in 1803 when the Supreme Demons eliminated Congress. Since then it has grown crazier and crazier, with exactly two semi-lucid intervals forced by undeservedly great leaders FDR and Ike.

Idiocy from DW:
"...Britain was better off in the EU because we could have a say in what regulations were made...."
STOP AND THINK, IDIOT.
In the first place Britain DIDN'T have a say. In the second place, EU regulations WON'T MATTER when you're out of the EU.
And then you dare to call the Leavers "uninformed" and "unintelligent".
= = = = =
Unfortunately there's also delusion if not idiocy on the other side:
From the Von types:

While secession of American states is often dismissed as absurd, there are few reasons to believe that a state like Texas - to name just one example - could not immediately transition from state to nation-state.

You're missing the only thing that matters. Raw force. Brussels doesn't have nukes. DC does have nukes. DC has repeatedly shown an instant readiness to use all necessary force to squash every hint of secession. Unless a coalition of states containing missile sites can QUICKLY take over all the missile sites, there's no point in thinking about secession.

Idiot Ryan likes to accuse populists of 'nostalgia' because we remember how things ACTUALLY WORKED for many years and we don't see why it can't work that way again. This isn't nostalgia, it's logic.
Ryan's own form of nostalgia is just weird. Today he's proposing simplified taxes yet again, doing the old postcard routine yet again.
This is not logic or even real nostalgia. He's remembering an idea that
(1) Won't happen because tax reform ALWAYS means more complexity.
(2) Was never necessary because most wage-earners use 1040EZ, as simple as a postcard. IRS will fill it in for you if you want. Can't get any easier!
(3) Is even more unnecessary NOW because even fairly complex tax forms are easy with computer helpers like TurboTax.
Ryan does show proper nostalgia on a different level. He's drifting in pleasant memories of Shit Repooflicans Like To Chant. Enough of this modern BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI. Let's get back to the good old days when we chanted ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX.
Both magic incantations are equally irrelevant and incomprehensible and delusional, but ZERO TAX apparently has a sweet taste in Ryan's calvarium.
Aside from my usual silliness, the real problem here is the consistent Repooflican hatred of the GOOD FUNCTIONAL parts of government and love of the EVIL parts of gov't. Repoofs mock IRS, Post Office, SS and Agriculture, which are FUNCTIONAL and normal parts. They expand POINTLESS AGGRESSIVE WARS and DHS and FBI, which are the EVIL parts.

Few days ago I compared Soros to Dillinger.
= = = = = START REPRINT:Soros is telling Britain:My 60 years of experience tells me the pound will plummet, along with your living standards. The only winners will be speculators.
In other words:
The last time you pulled away from My Empire, I robbed you blind. I will also rob you blind this time.
I was thinking that this blame-the-victim shit is a lot like the commies blaming Trump for the commie demonstrators who attacked Trump supporters. Trump instigated those violent thugs by existing.
Then I realized ... No, it's not A LOT LIKE, it's THE SAME FUCKING THING, because those anti-Trump thugs WERE WORKING DIRECTLY FOR GEORGE SOROS.
We wouldn't let John Dillinger blame the bank tellers for allowing him to rob them.
Why do we allow Soros ... Oh. Yes. Dillinger wasn't Master Race. Soros is. When you are Master Race, everything you say is logical, true and mandatory by definition.
= = = = = END REPRINT.
Now that Soros has stolen a few trillion and laughed about it, I see the comparison was poor. Unlike my cartoon, Dillinger was NOT a lone gunman. He stormed a bank with a dozen subthugs, taking out all guards and cops along the way. Everyone understood that resistance was suicide.
Soros, like the rest of his Tribe, doesn't use guns. What's more, he doesn't rob small-town banks and ordinary citizens; he robs BIG traders and investors by manipulating transactions. These BIG traders and investors must know that they are being swindled by Soros or by an agent acting for Soros. No guns are involved, nobody can get killed. So: WHY DON'T THEY REFUSE TO BE MANIPULATED? With billions at stake you could afford serious investigation and publicity to block Soros's actions and frontrun his blackmail. Why don't they permanently lock out all of Soros's tentacles? I don't get it.

Fun to watch all the INDIVIDUALISTIC NONCONFORMIST CREATIVE INNOVATIVE RADICAL REVOLUTIONARY DISRUPTIVE YOU CAN'T JUDGE ME artist types mourning the loss of total tyranny and total censorship and total uniformity, desperately trying to maintain the STATUS QUO.
Stop and think. If tyranny and censorship and uniformity are CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT to your existence, you are not a non-conformist. You are a goose-stepping totalitarian. If you need above all to maintain the STATUS QUO, you are a REACTIONARY, not a radical.
If you are genuinely creative, you should want a world with more VARIED AND INDEPENDENT places, so that you can find a place where your own set of skills will be comfortable and supported.

This map from Politico.eu shows the Graybillian reason for Brexit, at least within England and Wales. I don't understand what's driving Scotland, so I won't try to say anything about it.
Graybill's Law: Globalism forces each country to focus on just ONE skill, and forces all economic activity into ONE location and ONE type of business.
Before EU, England had a wide range of skills. Coal, wool, textiles, banking, steel, electronics.
After EU, only banking prospered. All other skills were forced to shut down.
Politico's map shows this beautifully. The parts of England that were accustomed to MAKING things are angry that their skills and utility are no longer wanted. The banking zone around London, accustomed to TAKING things, is happy with globalism.
Constructive vs destructive. Globalism favors the destructive and starves the constructive.
Fortunately the constructive parts of England haven't been entirely starved yet.

ENGLAND IS FREE!
When I went to bed last night, BBC was cheerful and chipper as the Empire seemed to be winning.
When I woke up this morning and turned on BBC again, the announcers were deeply depressed. Can it be true?
YES!
Cameron is resigning. GOOD.
Markets are screaming. GOOD.
EU bureaucrats are sternly lecturing the "infantile" Brits. GOOD.
The BIG POINT: Bullies can be broken. One firm resistance is enough to melt a monster. It will take time, but the EU monster will melt.

CANCEL THE TEXT BELOW! I've never been so happy to be proved wrong.
= = = = =
Well, so much for Brexit.
EU has learned that assassination works. More assassinations to come. More invasions and rapes and murders by Dreamer migrants. More empire. More tyranny. More genocide. More killing the poor to enrich Goldman.
Krauts learned that the third time is the charm. Kaiser Bill tried to smash England and failed. Adolf tried and failed. Merkel tried and succeeded without using massive force. One shot was enough this time.
The only good part is that truth will be DRAMATICALLY visible now. The Goldman shark will no longer hide its teeth.

Latest pic from KSHS: A Watkins Products salesman around 1900. Looks tired and dusty. Usually a picture of a Man And His Ride will show pride of ownership. Hand on fender, hand on back of horse. Not here. Just tired.
These narrow one-man buggies were popular with peddlers and postmen and aptronymic postladies but have dropped into obscurity. Rarely seen in advertisements or paintings from the era. The horsey version of a business coupe. Note the complex harness, with reins passing through holes in the dashboard.
Watkins Products is still around, still in the same basic line of business, considerably less tired and dusty now.

Every year Spokane holds Gangfest, a peculiar rite of sanctimonious suicidal Die-Versitarians who invite a bunch of gangsters to town to shoot hoops and honkies. Every year the gangsters shoot a bunch of hoops. Some years they fail to shoot any honkies. Not very successful in that department.
This year the city is running a dumb publicity campaign:

Everyone is a Pedestrian!
Spokane County, WA—Hoopfest activities will draw pedestrians to downtown Spokane. Spokane County has seen an increase in pedestrian deaths and serious injury collisions, 24 pedestrian fatalities and 123 pedestrian serious injuries from 2010 through 2014. Most pedestrian crashes occur during clear weather, from the hours of 3:00pm to 9:00pm and with a pedestrian in the roadway.
Pedestrians should use the sidewalks were available and cross only at intersections or marked crosswalks. Make eye contact with the drivers etc etc

Good specific advice, I guess.
As a serious long-term pedestrian, I resent the We Are All Pedestrians shit.
We are NOT all pedestrians. Most people never walk on the street or sidewalk. They walk from their kitchen to the garage, drive to work or mall, then walk from their parking place to the store or office. When they intend to Obtain Exercise, they drive to an Officially Designated Exercise Location like the Centennial Trail or a Gymnasium, then Officially Exercise for a specified period, then drive home.
Real pedestrians don't need the advice. Long experience has taught us what works and what doesn't work.
If the advice is new to you, then by definition you are not a Pedestrian. You are a Driver. That's why you need the advice.

But this was no banner-waving activist, and the crowd in this instance was made up of members of the 127-year-old American Dialect Society. “We need to accept ‘they’, and we need to do it now,” came the linguist’s cry, and at that moment an otherwise apolitical event took on an unexpected edge.

APOLITICAL?
Academics are NEVER apolitical. Here's what BBC considers APOLITICAL:

The Society was meeting in Washington DC to decide on its Word of the Year for 2015. Of all the possible candidates – which included ‘ghost’, ‘ammosexual’ and ‘Thanks, Obama’ – its final choice was an apparently straightforward pronoun. On the face of it, ‘they’ is hardly trailblazing. But what is controversial is the acceptance of a new way of using it. The Society’s website explains that “’They’ was recognised by the society for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of ‘he’ and ‘she’.”

Thanks, Obama. Apolitical. Nuff said.
The real problem, of course, is that BBC and academics don't see this as a contradiction. In their alien mind-like substances, total abject adherence to this week's Correct Line as defined by the party traditionally representing the Left (Labour, Democrat) is apolitical. In linguistic terms, unmarked. Failing to sing the current song of Labour or Democrat is political and heretical and
Recognizing they as a singular common-gender pronoun would NOT have been political 50 years ago. The usage was already advancing NATURALLY to replace clumsy formations like he or she. By recognizing they right now, and making specific reference to bizarre science-denier delusions like "non-binary", the decision becomes intensely political.
One quoted expert gets the principle right while missing basic facts about the history of English:

Sally McConnell-Ginet, Professor Emeritus in linguistics at Cornell University [says] “We’re much less likely to accept a new form like that than to just allow ‘they’ to expand its scope a bit so that you can freely use it to talk about specific individuals – and that is happening more and more.”
She points to one example that indicates we could embrace ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. “There is a parallel in the history of English. We used to have ‘you’ contrasting with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, and now we happily use ‘you’. We say ‘you go to the store’, not ‘you goes to the store’ – even if addressing a single individual, we still use the plural verb form,” she says. “People don’t seem to be upset about that – why can’t we do the same with ‘they’? Just let it expand to do this job.”

Correct about natural evolution, incorrect about you and thou. In fact ye was nominative plural and you was accusative plural, contrasting with thou (nom sing) and thee (acc sing).
In table form,

....

Sing

Plur

Nom

Thou

Ye

Acc

Thee

You

The reversed rhymes of this pattern probably contributed to the eventual conflation of all four forms into you.
Sally Hyphen-Hyphen really should know better.

Vaguely connected to previous item about persistence of spirit....
I've been listening to EWTN for a loooooong time, first on SW then on AM, and more recently reading their NCR website.
Their powerful founder Mother Angelica had been 'out of commission', incapable of giving orders, for several years after a stroke, and finally died a couple months ago.
While Angelica was alive though mute, EWTN was trying to resist Antichrist. There are obvious limits for any major Roman organization; can't rile up the bishops too much; but within those limits, EWTN was correctly reporting Antichrist's heresies and tyrannies.
IMMEDIATELY after Angelica's body died, EWTN gave up the fight. Now they're defending and loving Antichrist just like CNN or NPR or Fox. The website's format also changed. Previously each day had included a 'roundup' of real Catholic comments from various bloggers. After Angelica's physical death, the 'roundup' disappeared, indicating that they no longer wanted to be responsible for quoting Christians.

New Scientist has a brief article on an INTERESTING development.
Researchers were worried about transplanted organs developing cancer despite seeming 'clean' at the time of transplant. They checked to see what kind of gene activity persists in a dead organism. Killed a bunch of mice by wringing their necks, then extracted genetic material at intervals for 48 hours.
Most of their findings make sense in terms of an orderly shutdown and cleanup procedure, and their original question was answered. Genes that create inflammation and cancer were upregulated (switched on) after death, and stayed on for varying periods, doing what genes do, synthesizing proteins.
The surprising part: A whole bunch of genes that normally act during EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT also switched on and started work, and these genes seemed to be peaking at 48 hours.
The researchers didn't try to guess what these genes are doing.
Reasonable guess: Maybe they're a vestigial remnant of an earlier system in which organisms regenerate after two or three days?
Sounds familiar somehow.... regenerate ... three days ... old system for regeneration no longer operating .... new system is just plain death ... Seems like I've heard this before, but can't quite place it.

Seems to be a recent trend toward an unconventional arrangement of wheels. The stupid Segway and its stupidest descendant the Hoverboard have two wheels located transversely. All previous two-wheeled vehicles had the two wheels spaced axially.
But wait! These stupid toys are NOT the first vehicle arranged this way. In fact the LARGEST of all wheeled vehicles has this arrangement. What is it?
The irrigator.
Aerial maps of southwest Kansas show the work of these vehicles, creating a mysterious radial landscape or a carton of assorted PacMans, depending on scale of interpretation. The bigger circles on this map are a half mile in diameter, which means the irrigator vehicle is a quarter mile wide and 20 feet long. Beats all other vehicles, even those giant mine excavators. Even beats the AMC Pacer in a competition for egregious width.
= = = = =
Randomly semi-related: A 1922 British discussion of applying electricity to farming included this wonderfully elegant idea to simplify the heartache of plowing:
Note the 500-volt temporary overhead line and the transformer lorry. The plow itself was pulled back and forth between two slow-moving trucks that moved forward once per row, like a giant typewriter.
Vastly more convenient and safe than a tractor or horses. With a tractor or horses, you have to avoid hooking up your temporary overhead 500-volt line to the main HV line, and you have to avoid buying and using a transformer lorry, and you have to avoid stringing up a 100-yard cable between your two winding wagons because you already avoided buying two winding wagons, and you avoid the freedom from contour plowing, which means you also avoid the thrilling excitement of a field that blows away in every windstorm. Tractors and horses also avoid paying the representative of the Electrical Supply Authority to make the hookup, and avoid paying the four men who supervise and synchronize the various cables and winding wagons. All of that avoidance of equipment and labor is costly!
= = = = =
Hey! I'm starting to think like an economist. What's next? Appreciating NIRP? Nope.

Chaka Fattah was convicted of nonsensical "ethics" charges for doing what all politicians do. Jailed for breathing. Normally Repooflicans get ethicuted. When a D gets ethicuted, he must have done something SERIOUS to offend the masters.
All politicians, if they want to succeed, are forced to break campaign finance rules. Finance rules exist so the masters can prosecute any successful politician who commits heresy. The charges are automatically there, waiting for the detonator.
What was Fattah's heresy? I don't know. I hadn't noticed him before.
Going through his Wiki bio ....
Strong emphasis on education. He created several Federal scholarship programs, which look unremarkable and not especially meaningful. Might have even helped a few youngsters. No heresy there.
He's the ranking D on the House committee that funds the Department of Dysjustice. Since the Dept of Dysjustice is prosecuting him on "ethics", maybe he failed to raise their funding? But even the ranking D on a House committee can't unilaterally cut funding if everyone else wants it.
Aha! Here it is.

Fattah states that his priority is ensuring that small and medium businesses have the tools they need to prosper in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. He is the lead Democrat responsible for funding the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. In his role on the Appropriations Committee, Fattah has advocated to $128 million in funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a program that assists small and mid-sized manufacturers create and retain jobs, increase profits, and save time and money.

Maximum sin, maximum heresy. Making a move that TROLL Trump would approve, a Federal project that might HELP NORMAL PEOPLE. DON'T FEED THE TROLLS! See what happens when you take money that might have gone to Jamie Dimon's bonus and redirect it to (trigger warning for delicate ears) m*n*f*c**ring? The horrible word is even dirty after I bowdlerized it for you. I apologize.
NO!!!! EVEN WORSE!!!!.......

Fattah is considered a “true champion” of the co-op movement by the American Co-op Association.
In May 2013, Fattah introduced the Creating Jobs through Cooperatives Act (HR 2437). This legislation will provide means to catalyze cooperative development, provide tools to entrepreneurs to bring cooperative to their communities, partner with financial institutions to provide grants a loans to developing businesses, offer technical training and professional development.

Coops are a TERRORIST BLOW directed at the very foundations of Goldman[pbuh] capitalism, which is of course the TRUE AND ONLY capitalism. Goldman[pbuh] is the only God, and Goldman[pbuh] is his prophet.
Okay, now I see why Fattah is a sworn enemy of all that's good. Who knows what TERRORIST harm he might have done if allowed to continue? We're unquestionably better off with him in prison. Sing along with me: WHAT'S GOOD FOR JAMIE DIMON[pbuh] IS GOOD FOR AMERICA.

Following last week's pet peeve on people who don't know how to ASK A FUCKING QUESTION. Here's the ultimate useless question:
Well now, Ade. Can I call you Ade? Okay, I'll call you Ade. Let's parse out this question in the only possible way. The question mark at the end of your sentence indicates that the text before the question mark is the content, the gist as it were, of your question. So you are asking for information on ? .
We can look up ? in a dictionary or Wiki for you. We find:

The question mark [ ? ] (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism)[1] is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions. The question mark glyph is also often used in place of missing or unknown data. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+003F ? QUESTION MARK (HTML ?).

Must admit I've never heard ? called eroteme. The term would more appropriately apply to =D or {(.)} but it was probably invented by some ivory-tower creature who claimed to be above such nonsense.
Turned out to be a literal FUCKING QUESTION after all. See Rohrschach jokes.

Interesting to watch chickens spreading through the neighborhood. The first set began four years ago; unimpressive at first, it's turned into an exemplary urban farm. The second began this year; I don't think they have intentions of full farming, but their hens make a nice homey soundscape. Now a third resident is building pens that look chickeny. Might be rabbity instead, but given the trend I'll bet chickeny.
Also interesting to examine the status change of chickens. 60 years ago chickens in the yard were a definite mark of country-hick poverty. Okie jokes and nigger jokes often featured chickens. Of course the attitude among Okies and blacks was not contemptuous or snide. Chickens were just a good way to get eggs and meat.
Now, after a few decades when chickens were totally absent from all urban areas, the prejudice has faded and the practical attitude has taken over.

A prosecutor in south-central Idaho is refuting a widespread rumor that three young Syrian refugees raped a girl at knifepoint. Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs says that no gang rape involving Syrian refugees or a knife took place despite allegations currently circulating on social media and conspiracy-oriented websites.
However, anti-refugee activists have aggressively pushed the story, arguing that police failed to respond the alleged incident in a timely manner. Loebs denies this claim. Instead, Loebs said charges have been filed involving young children at a laundry room at a Twin Falls apartment building, but those records are sealed because of the ages of the juveniles.
Idaho has refugee resettlement centers in Boise and Twin Falls. No Syrian refugees have been resettled in Twin Falls.

Twin Falls Police Chief Craig Kingsbury has confirmed that three boys who were allegedly involved in the rape of a five-year-old girl in Twin Falls were of Iraqi and Sudanese descent.
At a press conference in Twin Falls, Chief Kingsbury addressed community members and the city council about the alleged assault and explained that two of the three boys involved in the incident are at a detention center following the crime. The boys are reported to have been in the Twin Falls area for less than two years.
Chief Kingsbury was unable to confirm or deny if the boys are refugees.

So. The incident ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and the perps are refugees, whether defined officially or not. The XENOPHOBE TROLLS are basically correct, with a couple of wrong details.
Good rectifying, AP. Winston Smith's supervisor would be proud as punch.
= = = = =
Aside from the temporary questions of invading armies and memory holes, the BIG PERMANENT PROBLEM here is PRIVACY LAWS about juvenile crime. We miss the chance to RECOGNIZE PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS because of murderous privacy laws. A pro criminal starts work at age 9. By the time we start counting "real" offenses at 18, he has usually piled up a dozen MAJOR crimes including one or two killings. Gang leaders have taken full advantage of his official immunity, using him as a reliable and trainable tool. Over-18 tools are much more likely to be jailed, thus interrupting the valuable training process. If we had been counting crimes equally from birth, we could have slammed him in prison by 14, thus saving several lives and depriving gang leaders of their best tools.

Soros is telling Britain:My 60 years of experience tells me the pound will plummet, along with your living standards. The only winners will be speculators.
In other words:
The last time you pulled away from My Empire, I robbed you blind. I will also rob you blind this time.
I was thinking that this blame-the-victim shit is a lot like the commies blaming Trump for the commie demonstrators who attacked Trump supporters. Trump instigated those violent thugs by existing.
Then I realized ... No, it's not A LOT LIKE, it's THE SAME FUCKING THING, because those anti-Trump thugs WERE WORKING DIRECTLY FOR GEORGE SOROS.
We wouldn't let John Dillinger blame the bank tellers for allowing him to rob them.
Why do we allow Soros ... Oh. Yes. Dillinger wasn't Master Race. Soros is. When you are Master Race, everything you say is logical, true and mandatory by definition.

UN is running a propaganda campaign to "do something" about the refugees that OUR wars have created. Needless to say, UN doesn't suggest that we should STOP ATTACKING every country except Israel. No, UN only wants to help us destroy our own people by forcing the refugees from OUR wars onto OUR people. All XENOPHOBE BUFFOONS must be slaughtered to make room for refugees.
Meanwhile, the same empire continues to bash Turkey for "human rights violations" because Turkey is TROLL. We don't mention the fact that Turkey has been housing and feeding millions of Syrian refugees without any help.
I suppose there's some justice in this on a national level, except that the people who are attacked and raped and murdered and disemployed by refugees are NOT the same people who make the wars. The imperial dynasties and their courtiers are never raped or attacked or disemployed.
I've already run the numbers on war deaths to parse out Hillary's kill record. She killed 265,000 people during her term as SecState. Now let's try an estimate for the refugees. It's harder to pin these numbers down because many "refugees" are not really fleeing wars; they're escaping from a bad economy or crime. Also, the war deaths are separated by year, so I could parse out Hillary's exact contribution. These refugee numbers are cumulative totals. Nevertheless we can say that Hillary is fully responsible for Libya, Ukraine and Syria; and partly responsible for maintaining our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia and Sudan. She is NOT responsible for the long-running wars in Central Africa, Congo, Burundi, etc. Those wars started and continued with no major US connection.
Total refugees from the countries that fully or partly belong to Hillary:
Afghan 2.6mil
Iraq 246k
Libya only 6k ???
Somalia 1.1m
Sudan 1.5m
Syria 4.8m
Ukraine 300k
-----
Total 10.5m
Hooray for Hillary! Hooray for Genocide!
265000 dead, 10.5 million refugees!
Quite a wonderful record, especially compared to TROLL Trump's miserable ZERO in both departments.
Note: The Libya number seems absurdly small, considering that Libya has been a major source of the refugees passing through Italy into Germany and UK; but no way to find better numbers.

Almost got run down this morning by one of those Lycra Bycra assholes. Zooming along Wellesley on his $10k custom bicycle, with his $1k custom-made Lycra ass in the air. Humped it through the 4-way stop without pausing or looking, maintaining 31.768 mph in order to summit** the Shadle hill in Gear #41.8 of his 256 available gears.
Asshole.
Reminded me of the last encounter with a bicyclist at the same corner. Six months ago in slippery January, I was walk-skating northward and a ragged old coot, maybe even slightly raggeder and older than me, was coming the other way. He was trying to stay upright on his $10 Huffy while smoking a Bugler. Finally gave up and walked the bike. As we met I said something like "Not a fun day for biking, is it?" and he said "Nope. But she'll get better. She always does."
Perfect contrast. Arrogant ass-view from the $10k man, tough nobility from the $10 man.
= = = = =
** Language note: Summiting is an asshole verb.

As usual I was insufficiently paranoid.
When I heard that the Bureau of Instigation had "interviewed" the Orlando dude, I figured they were trying to get a sting going but decided he was too smart. Like other gang leaders, FBI prefers low-IQ or weak-minded stingees who will follow orders easily. I dismissed the notion of FBI influence on his eventual acts.
Right about the facts, wrong about the influence. An insider knows better:

“It looks like it's pretty much standard operating procedure for preliminary inquiries to interview the subject or pitch the person to become an informant and/or plant an undercover or informant close by to see if the person bites on the suggestion,” Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to the FBI Director exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, told AlterNet. “In the case of Mateen, since he already worked for a security contractor [G4S], he was either too savvy to bite on the pitch or he may have even become indignant that he was targeted in that fashion. These pitches and use of people can backfire.”

In everyday life, suspicions and worries often turn out to be groundless. But when dealing with USA STRONG, facts always turn out to be worse than any paranoia I can develop.

From the 1945 electronics trade journal mentioned in previous item, here's a NEAT postwar product suggestion that didn't get picked up.
When I worked in motels we had a similar Telechron gadget to set wakeup calls. The guest would ring the office, I'd set the appropriate quarter-hour on the clock, then make a corresponding note on the Wakeup Sheet.
The ad claims 'volume producers are now choosing it', but as far as I can tell no radio manufacturer actually took up Telechron's offer. Too bad. The idea of programmed listening didn't go commercial until VCRs in the 80s. (There were plenty of clock radios, but they just turned on once like a regular alarm clock.)
... Aha. After a moment of thinking, the problem is obvious. People don't turn a radio on and off per program. They turn it on in the morning and leave it on till bedtime. [Especially true in the tube era, when radios took two minutes to warm up.] A clock that changed the tuning to the correct station for Farm News or Winchell or Fibber might have been more useful, but the controls would have been wildly complex. The same problem happened with VCRs. Even with a full-screen menu, very few people managed to program their VCRs correctly.
Also, the October issue has a detailed guide to building an atomic bomb, summarizing a 150-page PUBLIC document issued by the War Dept just a few days after Nagasaki. Shows a rather different approach to classification than we use now, to put it mildly. On p. 722 of the PDF.
Later: Googling to see if any radio actually used the gadget, found something better: A wire recorder with the Telechron on the front. Direct ancestor of the VCR!
And finally: My kind of ad!
Using a dam as a positive symbol would be Unthink now. EPA Terrorist Army would close you down with protesters. Advertising SKILLS of American workers wouldn't bring protests, but it would be completely uninteresting to corporate traitors. Only Asians have the SKILL of working for near-zero wages, which is the only SKILL that counts now.
= = = = =
Later update: Motorola went whole hog in 1938 with a radio that automatically switched up to six preselected stations. AND the same radio had a wireless remote control box. So the idea of full-auto programming was fully developed but never made a splash.

Found a great big resource in GoogleBooks, a 1945 electronics journal aimed at industrial users. Some forgotten ckts, some anticipations of digital stuff, lots of learning.
More broadly interesting: This is a 12-month volume starting at July 45. With magazines, especially trade journals, the actual writing is finished three or four months before the masthead date. So the July issue was mainly written in Feb and Mar 45. What's missing? No war propaganda at all, no wartime atmosphere. It's written on the assumption that the war is over. The ads are in peacetime already, Army surplus distribution is well under way.
This announcement from FCC in the August issue gives a hint of the internal Fed processes. (WPB = War Production Board)
Something similar appears in the auto industry. Passenger car production actually started July 3, 45, which means the order to start would have been given about six months earlier.
In other words: We KNEW around Feb 45 that the war would be done by August. Food for thought.
Nowadays, of course, we're past those primitive notions of "ending" a war. We abandoned the ancient notion in Korea, which is still nominally at war. When we attacked Vietnam, we couldn't schedule an end because we were soundly defeated and ran for our lives. All of our aggressions since then have been carefully designed as self-expanding perpetual motion machines. Attack a country that didn't attack us; kill lots of the natives and piss off the survivors; pick up some of the survivors and forcibly import them into USA and EU so they can attack our natives; when our natives get pissed off at being attacked, bomb them. It's complicated but it works BEAUTIFULLY.

Constant puzzle. Why do establishment types say dumb things? Who do they think they're fooling?
Biggest and worst example, of course, is the myth that QE/ZIRP was "meant to improve the economy." It wasn't, and Bugsy Bernanke SAID IT WASN'T. AT THE VERY START, HE SAID QE WAS DESIGNED TO BOOST STOCKS AND NOTHING ELSE. And he was right, because he knew what he was doing. Despite this, all the imperial media continue to tell us that QE is not working very well because it's SURPRISINGLY not having the desired effect.
New example in a BBC article on likely effects of Brexit vs non-Brexit. I shouldn't complain, since BBC has rather bravely restrained its MORE EMPIRE demon to write a halfway objective and unemotional piece ... but even so, why do they say this:

A Remain vote will be received with a collective sigh of relief... [EU leaders] will be expected to fast-track the changes to the UK's membership negotiated by David Cameron earlier this year - including curbs on in-work benefits for EU migrants, safeguards for sterling and an opt-out from ever closer union.

WHAT? Those concessions were solely designed to give Dave something to talk about. If Brexit fails, Dave no longer needs talking points.
This is just human nature. Even a normal sane non-satanic organization would quietly forget those offers and resume the status quo. EU is insane and satanic, so it will clamp down FEROCIOUSLY after the prey is back inside its jaws.
= = = = =
Three days later:

But, within hours, Mr Juncker had rubbished the Prime Minister’s suggestion he will be able to encourage more change within the EU. The unelected official told reporters in Brussels: “The British policy makers and British voters have to know that there will not be any kind of renegotiation.”

Despite 100 years of knowledge and warning, idiots still fall for this shit. Fortune-ately these idiots are rich, so their loss is a net gain for civilization......

News emerged Friday that The DAO, a venture capital fund operating through a decentralized blockchain inspired by Bitcoin, had been robbed of more than $60 million worth of Ether digital currency, or about 1/3 of its value, through a code exploit.

And it's not just a hack, it's a mathematical proof showing that the entire operation CANNOT work as advertised. Thus the entire operation is an intentional fraud.

The DAO has been touted as the first major implementation of a Decentralized** Autonomous Organization, a financial organization underpinned by so-called “smart contracts,” written in computer code and enforced through a blockchain which controls investors’ digital currency holdings.
In short, the DAO is meant to eliminate lawyers and other humans from contract negotiations and financial dispute resolution. That possibility, along with security advantages, has contributed to major banks’ surging investment in blockchain technology.
But by finding an unintended code exploit, the DAO hacker has called into question the core idea that code can substitute for human-dependent legal and financial processes.

Foolish blockchain investors really ought to watch thesetwo episodes of Racket Squad. There's nothing new about the Blockchain scam. Set up a system under the scammer's control, a system that appears to move lots of money around without human checking. After the mark is convinced that the system favors him, snatch the money and run.
Much as I enjoy the vengeful image of homeless starving lawyers overdosing on Oxy, the simple fact is that human checking and human feedback can stop frauds. Lawyers who write and inspect contracts are not the same as predatory prosecutors and ACLU lawyers. I can't get properly vengeful against bookkeeper types.
Putting it another way: There's no such thing as 'untouched by human hands'. If the part of the system available to you looks robotic, it means you are unprotected from the trickery of the humans who developed the system. They paid lawyers to guarantee that you don't get a lawyer. They paid auditors and coders to guarantee that you can't use an auditor or coder.
= = = = =
** Let's return to this word DECENTRALIZED, which is the CENTER of the blockchain fraud. You CANNOT be decentralized when you are using the Web. When you are operating through the Web, you are connecting to the NSA, and you are also opening yourself to spies and hackers of all types. Blockchain methods are the most centralized of all, since all parties to the whole blockchain must participate in every transaction. The only way to have a decentralized transaction is with PAPER currency and PAPER contracts. If you want to be really safe, write the contract by hand or on a free-standing mechanical typewriter. PAPER doesn't automatically send signals to NSA. It is simply exchanged between the two parties, usually with copies deposited in locations trusted by both parties.

Trump continues to gather exdorsements. All the worst enemies of civilization have come out against him. Now Apple, the most evil corporation in history, has cancelled advertising of the R Convention because Trump.
I'm surprised there was anything to cancel. I didn't think Apple had EVER supported ANYTHING remotely connected to Repoofs, even when Repoofs were represented by hypermonsters with the same infinitely traitorious America-hating China-loving lunatic slavedriving world-smashing views as Apple; but apparently it was putting a few pennies into RNC. Now it won't.
GOOD. We need to have the lines drawn clearly if we're going to have a proper revolution.

I used to buy lots of architecture books from Dover. Not much lately, as I've moved away from graphics into more active electronic stuff. Dover continues to send occasional ads in email, which I do appreciate and read. This one is outright peculiar, and oddly out of character for an NYC publisher:
All of the portrayals are silly and contrived, but Trump and Sanders come out better than Hillary. Trump is shown as You're Fired, which is just his regular trademark, and as a builder, which is positive. Hillary is a housewife ... ???????????????? ... and a Wonder Woman dominatrix. The latter is appropriate and the former is superweird. Neither fits her self-chosen image as Supreme Warlordess Of All Universes. Bernie is shown with a barbecue outfit, which should please his vegan zero-gluten zero-MSG zero-GMO zero-KKKarbon breathatarian fans; and as a Vermont outdoorsman, which is pretty much his chosen image.
A bit later: I didn't notice the REALLY odd thing because it seemed normal until I ran the constants and variables on history. At this point in the process, Trump and Hillary are both presumptive nominees. Bernie shouldn't be there, and in all previous elections he wouldn't be there. This year conventional wisdom has shifted to understand that the PROCESS is criminal. Most people now understand that Trump and Bernie were picked by the VOTERS of their respective parties, and Hillary was picked by a long series of obviously loaded dice.
Normally both nominees would be pure 100% USDA Prime corruption, chosen by the Chosen. This year the Repoofs failed to load the dice, for reasons that are still unknown.

Come to think of it, Antichrist Francine is behind the curve of satanic fashion. Many other institutions are far ahead of AF when it comes to driving away your own followers or citizens or customers.
I see three stages in this trend.
Offering products or services that your best customers don't want is nothing new or special. Every business and organization does it at times. It's a basic part of life and learning.
Normal functional businesses LEARN from these mistakes. When Chrysler did this:
they got immediate negative feedback from dealers even before the customers had a chance to reject the Insect From Mars. Chrysler fired the designer and ran a crash program to improve the product, with good results. (Hint: Having a multi-layer feedback system is an excellent idea.)
Churches have been making a deeper mistake for a long time, offering products designed to please anti-Christians, then wondering why their Christian customers keep disappearing. They refuse to learn.
The trend Francine has joined is a third stage, going beyond corrected mistakes and uncorrected mistakes.
It showed up first in old media, in the 90s when the Web was starting to provide real competition. Newspapers, like any other business, watched their circulation and used it for feedback. In the 90s the Spokane paper had a cartoonist and a columnist who specialized in DIRECTLY AND PERSONALLY shitting and spitting on normal Spokane residents. The paper apparently got tired of canceled subscriptions, so they fired the cartoonist and damped down the columnist. For several years the paper was totally wrong and totally evil like all papers, but at least it didn't DIRECTLY AND PERSONALLY punch you in the face every time you opened it. Now they don't give a fuck. Back to their old kicking and punching habits, with no sign of monitoring an error signal.
The Repoofs went through the same menopause this year. For three decades they had been totally neglecting their own voters, working fiendishly hard to satisfy Israel and Mexico while committing vile treason against America. This year, after real competition emerged in the form of Trump, they started DIRECTLY AND PERSONALLY PUNCHING Americans over and over and over. They're still at it, even after they mistakenly allowed Trump to get those mysterious arcane alien things called "votes".
EU went through a partly similar pattern, but without the attempt to please non-customers. For many years EU quietly parasitized its own countries to enrich EU bureaucrats. Now that the loyal customers are starting to leave, it's DIRECTLY AND PERSONALLY KICKING THE SHIT OUT OF THEM.
And now Antichrist has joined the parade. At first heshe was just following the mainline church tradition. Work hard to satisfy people who will never never never attend your church, ignore your own loyal customers. Now heshe is DIRECTLY AND PERSONALLY PUNCHING the best and longest-suffering customers.
= = = = =
One aspect is puzzling. The violence seems to emerge AFTER real competition appears. From the outside and from common sense, you'd think an organization would coast along, stuck on stupid, until strong competition forced it to mend its ways. But the opposite happens. Strong competition leads to futile and self-destructive frothing and spitting.
... After a walk, the answer showed up. NOTHING TO LOSE. When the Repoofs realized Trump had developed a mysterious impenetrable secret magic method (ie telling the truth) they realized they were finished. Nothing left but mass shooting. The Roman Church has been through this before. When Luther and Zwingli provided real competition, Rome started shooting its own best followers with the CounterReformation. I don't see the sudden competition this time, but given Rome's tortoise-like nervous system, maybe this is simply a delayed response to the 20-year-long disgust with choirboy-fucking priests.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.